Pauline Hanson has issued a partial apology after suggesting there are no 'good' Muslims in Australia, following a rare public rebuke from Coalition Senator Matt Canavan, who declared the One Nation leader "not fit to lead" over remarks he called "reprehensible."
The episode — which unfolded on February 18 and generated coverage across the ABC and The Guardian — is the latest in a long series of inflammatory interventions by Hanson in the weeks before a federal election. But Canavan's public denunciation is notable precisely because it came from within the conservative bloc rather than from Labor or the Greens.
Hanson's original remarks amounted to a sweeping denial that any 'good' Muslims exist — a statement that, even by the One Nation leader's standards, attracted immediate and significant backlash. The partial apology that followed was characteristic: enough concession to take the temperature down, not enough to constitute a genuine retraction. Hanson has been deploying this rhetorical pattern for three decades.
Canavan's intervention is the more interesting political story. The Queensland senator is not a moderate. He has spent years in the thick of the conservative culture wars, fighting climate policy and championing coal. When he calls another conservative's remarks "reprehensible" and their maker "not fit to lead," it is not a signal coming from the Liberal left.
What it signals is something more useful for understanding the current political moment: even within the hard right, there are limits to what is considered electorally viable. With the federal election imminent, the Coalition's internal calculations about where votes come from and where they go are acute. Australia's Muslim community — estimated at approximately 813,000 people, concentrated heavily in Western Sydney, Melbourne's northern and western suburbs, and Brisbane's southside — is not a marginal demographic in the electorates that matter.
For Australia's Muslim communities, the impact of Hanson's remarks extends well beyond electoral arithmetic. Faith leaders and community advocates have been consistent in documenting the relationship between inflammatory political speech and reported incidents of anti-Muslim harassment. That connection does not appear in the apology, partial or otherwise.
The question for Peter Dutton, who has spent the campaign carefully trying to hold together the moderate Liberal base and the One Nation-adjacent vote, is what he does with Canavan's very public break. Silence reads as endorsement of Hanson's position. Endorsement of Canavan risks a fight with Hanson at the worst possible moment. Dutton has, as of publication, chosen the third option: saying nothing.
That is itself a choice. And Western Sydney's marginal seat voters, many of them Muslim, are paying attention.
Mate, it is worth stating plainly what is happening here. Weeks before a federal election, the leader of a party that holds the balance of power in the Senate has suggested Australia's Muslim community contains no good people. She has partially walked it back. A senior senator from the major conservative party has called her unfit to lead. The man who wants to be Prime Minister has said nothing.
That is the state of play in Australian politics in February 2026.
